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"However he held that the tweet's author, John Langley, was 'quite clearly acting as the agent of Mr Wood'."

Hm. I've generally been of the opinion that whenever someone uses the word "clearly" then they have lost the argument.

There is a novel point of law as to who is responsible for a twitter post on an account that has multiple users. In this case the judge held it was someone who had not made the post and who deleted it when the police told him about it. Having found that Wood was unaware about a lot of the tweeting activity.

But I'm really concerned that had this been in a national newspaper damages would have been £250k, but as it was a tweet the damages were £40k. That absolutely does not compute. A national newspaper would be read by millions of people. This tweet seems to have been seen by no more than 1,000 - provably, only to 10 - and many of those might have seen different publications. Damages are meant to restore reputation. Why is it £40 per person when it is a private individual publishing, but maybe 2.5p per person when it is the mass media?

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